Will The FTC Crack Down on Twitter Posts Too?
By Anna Johnson on July 27th, 2009Given the U.S. Federal Trade Commission’s plans to crack down on bloggers promoting products and services without disclosing their ulterior motives, TechCrunch’s Brian Solis asks whether the FTC will extend its scrutiny to people’s Twitter posts.
After all, when a Twitter user recommends a product or service, shouldn’t they also provide some kind of disclaimer that they are an affiliate or otherwise financially interested in the product or service?
“Whether it’s on Twitter, in blog posts, or in television commercials, paid tweets are technically no different than the array of commercials and advertisements that are available to marketers already – except that everyday people become the spokespeople and thus become difficult for followers to discern real experiences versus influenced perspectives,” said Brian Solis in a recent TechCrunch article.
Brian recently held a virtual summit on Facebook to discuss the issue with industry participants, along with possible solutions, ethics, standards, and how the industry might reduce the potential for consumer confusion and backlash.
To kick things off, Brian suggested that marketers begin using certain symbols or words such as ‘$’, ‘spon’, ‘paid’, ‘endorsement’, or ‘sponsored’ in promotional Tweets to indicate their financial motive or interest. Alternatively, any promotional link could go to a landing page that would explain the nature of the endorsement, ad, promotion, and the intention of the relationship.
Apparently, some of the participants in the virtual summit pointed out that using one term or another – e.g ‘paid’ versus ‘sponsored’ – might elicit certain unintended emotional responses. Meanwhile, Twitter is evidently thinking about introducing color coding or different fonts for sponsored and paid tweets.
The consensus among Brian’s group seems to be, however, that notating promotional Tweets in some way is desirable. And, for now, Brian reckons that in the absence of top-down regulation, Twitter rules, or industry standards, a sensible measure may be to provide disclosure on “individual wallpaper or include a link to a page that offers context and clarity.”
So… what do you think?
Can you see yourself putting a dollar sign or ‘spon’ or perhaps ‘aff’ next to the affiliate links you post in your Tweets? Would you like to see the people you follow start notating such links in some way?
It all sounds sensible doesn’t it… except that it’s not sensible at all. I’ll explain my – somewhat contrary – view tomorrow…
